Monday, September 13, 2010

The Office of Innovation within the Office of the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (“R”), has put together a site that tracks the number of Facebook fans (1,016,643) for all the 191 pages that the State Department maintains domestically and overseas (h/t to mountainrunner.us).

The Dashboard gives an overall view by date, trend (going up), top gainers (eJournal USA with +509 fans gained on 9/11), bottom 5 losers and top pages (eJournal USA with 180,203 fans, followed by US Embassy Jakarta with 148,429 fans).

We have extracted the data for the top ten Facebook pages of US embassy/related post overseas according to number of fans below. Regional acronyms: EAP (East Asia Pacific), WHA (Western Hemisphere), SCA (South and Central Asia), NEA (Near East Asia, includes North Africa and Middle East) and AF (Sub-Saharan Africa). US Embassy Macedonia with 4,589 fans is the top European post but none of the EUR posts made it to the top ten pages.

City, Country

Name

Type

Region

# Fans

1

Jakarta,
Indonesia,

U.S. Embassy - Jakarta, Indonesia

Embassy

EAP

148,429

2

Surabaya,
Indonesia,

US Consulate General Surabaya

Consulate

EAP

31,668

3

Argentina,
Buenos Aires

Centro de Recursos Informativos - Embajada de EE.UU. en Buenos Aires

IRC/BNC

WHA

23,728

4

Paraguay, Asuncion

Embajada de los Estados Unidos en Paraguay

Embassy

WHA

19,642

5

Bolivia,
La Paz

Embajada de Estados Unidos en La Paz

Embassy

WHA

17,166

6

Sri Lanka, Colombo

U.S. Embassy Colombo, Sri Lanka

Embassy

SCA

16,040

7

South Africa, Pretoria

United States Mission to South Africa

Embassy

AF

14,461

8

Egypt, Cairo

Study USA-Egypt

Foreign/
Other

NEA

11,445

9

Ecuador, Guayaquil

Consulado General de los Estados Unidos en Guayaquil

Consulate

WHA

11,062

10

Manila
Philippines

U.S. Embassy, Manila Philippines

Embassy

EAP

9,202

Click here to see the links to all 191 pages with corresponding data. Given the normally smaller staffing at consulates compared to embassies, it is perhaps striking that Surabaya and Guayaquil's are in the top list with over 10,000 fans (compared to say larger posts, like London, Paris, or Mexico City, all in the low thousands and have yet to break the 5,000 mark).

An about page has just been added to the site after I posted this blog entry. See below:

This project is a proof of concept (beta) which collects the total fan numbers for State Department Facebook fan pages. Since this is a beta, some of the numbers may be off and there may be gaps in the data.
Note: This only collects Facebook fan numbers and does not pull any information on participation rates, sentiment, personal participant details, or any other data. As such, it is a very high level view of the activity taking place on these pages and is, at best, a crude measurement of how successful these pages are.
How this works: The system queries Facebook's open graph once a day and gets the fan totals at that moment. Since you need authentication to pull more specific information (comment rates, likes, etc) the dashboard just pulls public data.

5 comments:

Thanks for the post! This is very much experimental, so there are certainly going to be some quirks. Let me know if there is any particular slice you'd be interested in and I can probably pull it out.

Regarding the numbers, it has been very interesting to see the various country and region performance over time. Paraguay for instance has very impressive numbers despite fairly low nation-wide internet penetration. Overall fan numbers is a rather crude measure and only provides hints at overall performance and mission success. Nonetheless, it certainly has given a glimpse of some really impressive activity in relatively unexpected places.

@jgoshert Sorry about missing Ciudad Juárez! I've just added it in and data should show up in a day or two for it. The list is based on a few sources so I'm likely missing more. I was, for example, also missing Baghdad. Oops.

DK -Thanks for your comment and responding to jgosher at CdJ. I realized that you are on beta but this is really cool for a nerd like me.

I'm interested in a couple of slices -- 1) countries with the highest internet penetration rates and how posts are doing there; and 2) countries with the highest jump in Internet users (Afghanistan the last time I looked was at 49,000%), and how are posts doing there. The largest Muslim countries in the world, and how embassy pages are faring there, too, would also be very interesting. Won't give a total picture of engagement but would still be an interesting slice to see given the demographic trends.

You can write me offline if you like at http://www.contactify.com/29ca0

Nice innitiative. I think it would be nice if you take % of fans on whole country population. We have only 3 million population (only 1 million internet users) and yet we have a 5700 fan community. Best Regards from US EMBASSY Montevideo.

The idea of showing per capita number of Facebook fans is actually something I've wanted to add and wouldn't be too hard to figure out. You can actually get good looking numbers of Facebook users by country from Facebook itself.

Some places are doing a great job when looking at per capita rates, Montevideo certainly being one of them. Colombo, Podgorica, Skopje are a few others in this category.

@Montevideo One of our posts actually pulled together some of this information. I'm planning to post it to the Social Media Hub tomorrow (sorry, everyone State intranet site).

@diplopundit I'll send you a message using the link you gave. The short answer though is I won't be able to integrate this data into the dashboard, but I'd be happy giving you the data I do have.